Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These too will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China is always changing. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is...

02/09/2012

How Do You Say 'Badonkadonk' in Chinese?

Feb 8 2012, 3:09 PM ET The story of OMG! Meiyu, Jessica Beinecke's wildly popular web video series for Chinese who want to learn American slang.

That language shapes culture and vice versa seems intuitive and axiomatic. Language and educational exchanges have always been a defining feature of the U.S.-China relationship. Regular people-to-people exchanges, including the State Department's "100,000 Strong" initiative started under President Obama, have been important to the bilateral relationship because of persistent and often serious mutual distrust. The experience of teaching English in China was perhaps most memorably captured in Peter Hessler's book Rivertown. Like Hessler and many Americans since, I too was once an English teacher in China, attempting to dissect the ingenuity of Jay-Z and explicating Hamlet's neurosis to my students. Though I can't say they fully understood the significance of H.O.V.A and To Be or Not to Be (I'm still not sure I do either), I hope they at least learned something about the diversity of America.

Given that experience, I was delighted to discover that, in the age of YouTube and social media, American English lessons have been taken to another level. Meet Jessica Beinecke, a Voice of America journalist who decided that she could leverage all the web 2.0 tools at her disposal to create a show that taught Chinese youth American slang. It's shot with only a webcam and was exclusively on Chinese Youku until recently migrating to YouTube. A profile in the Washington Post describes the show: